Who Really Found the Higgs Boson - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/who-really-found-the-higgs-boson <comment><USER2> I worked on the ATLAS experiment for 6 years. The article gives a reasonable description of the management structure and the unique upsides of that way of working. However it mostly skipped over the negative aspects.

Possibly due to the described desire for consensus, I found the organisation to be incredibly bureaucratic with incredibly lengthy processes. Releasing a paper usually involved around a dozen rounds of review with various groups, often arguing for days about linguistic style more than Physics content.

The lack of clear top-down control makes resource allocation very challenging. There were frequent complaints that Higgs analyses had too much manpower while less "sexy" tasks were chronically understaffed.

The lack of clear assignment of responsibilities also leads to lots of nasty internal politics between institutes. Especially the Higgs analysis where people were eternally engaged in attempts to land grab so they could claim responsibility for bits of the eventual discovery.

Overall, I enjoyed working there a lot. It is a unique structure and the sense of teamwork and lack of hierarchy is very nice. But this article is a bit of a whitewash. I don't think it should be lauded as some incredible model, it has at least as many problems as any other organisation of its size.

<comment><USER3> I've only worked very briefly in the CMS collaboration, but I've spent a lot of time with people in particle physics collaborations and at medium/large companies. My impression has always been that particle physics collaborations are _very_ well managed for their size, among the best managed human organizations Earth, but that obviously there are friction in getting 3k extremely ambitious scientists to agree on this.

For instance, the "frequent complaints that Higgs analyses had too much manpower" may be valid, but they're not really an example of organizational disfunction unless you had some objective reason to think they were making the wrong decision. Folks disagree about things whether they are inside organizations or not, and if those things are important the disagreement may be venomous. Likewise, the lengthy review process is painful and exhausting, but my impression from almost everyone is that it is _sound_ \-- comes to the right conclusions -- and that the conservatism is justified by the field's history of purported discoveries that were later retracted. This soundness is even more impressive when compared to the frequent complaints about the capricious nature of the refereeing process at regular journals, which involves just a handful of physicists. (This is to be compared to physics collaborations outside HEP, like Planck, which are often said to be more dysfunctional.)

So I guess I'm wondering if you could say more comparing ATLAS to similar organizations? "The lack of clear assignment of responsibilities" could certainly be a good criticism, and one that I would actually prefer to apply to physics as a whole. The major rewards are fame and esteem, rather than money, so everyone chases the sexiest, most highly visible tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very intriguing but just like most other articles on alternative management structures, this leaves out all the critical information and focuses on praising system without actually understanding it. While I understand that at CERN most people are working for pure passion at modest salaries while being very highly qualified as opposed to someone in 20s with goal to cash out stock options and retire ASAP, I think it's important to figure out if this is the driving reason behind success of loose management structure with no chain of command.

Any alternative management system proposal needs to answer questions like,

1\. How people gets hired? Who creates job posting, how interviews are conducted, who does negotiations, approvals and how talent gets attracted and retained?

2\. Is there differentiated performance reviews? If so who exactly conducts, signs off these? Is there curve? Is there expected distribution? Who approves promotions/pay raises? Who sets up these rules?

3\. If there minimum expectations for performance? Who determines firing and how?

4\. If there is no real manager and everything gets decided by commeeties, who sets up these commeeties? How work assignment is done? Who is accountable for tracking progress, success or failure? Who has final say in ties when conflicts occur?

5\. What options employees have when they want change? How transfer happen? Who approves these and what are the official rules?

<comment><USER5> This PR piece is utterly misleading. CERN copied and implemented matrix management, essentially what drove NASA JPL to the ground (ask Ron Garret, lisper). For a hint on NASA's future (not talking of the military) recall the name of the new space telescope. SLAC essentially closed down along with most other labs.

Those who are at the receiving end of the job delegation process report to several managers, none of whom need to take responsibility. Therefore only the one who reports can take hits, as in hightail (see win-win analysis of The Office on ribbonfarm). Obviously success is management's success, not least of the DG.

CERN management proper on the other hand is a tightly knit group (not talking about external contributors, "users" in CERN parlance) with the same level of transparency that need-to-know mechanisms allow for. There are even line- managers and the whole lot. Gianotti was earmarked for leadership position two or three decades ago and has been at CERN since her early twenties. Her external institute affiliation is just a mere formality in the sense that Italy has financially contributed to the CERN budget.

Make no mistake: there is a chain of command, but one that is heavily concealed behind a thick layer of administration (see ribbonfarm) protecting management. There are whole departments and groups devoted to implement the five questions you are wondering about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the loose management style described. My question, can such management be used in a commercial endeavor?</comment>


Microsoft Gives Rival Browsers a Lift - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/technology/08browser.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> Microsoft is definitely the reformed company after antitrust trouble, as with AT&T in the 80s.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something tells me that too. Their image seems to be increasingly improving in terms of innovation. I actually like Bing! and so do many of my non techy colleagues. They also seem to be doing some other cool stuff (Win 7 -- big relief to anyone who suffered Vista).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: looking for opinions on how to interpret the C++ FQA. - <AUTHOR> http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html <comment><USER2> The author states a purpose at [http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/why.html](http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/why.html) and more at [http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/faq.html](http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/faq.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I haven't used C++ in a long time, but I didn't like it when I did use it. The FQA brought me much comedic joy when I found it, but I'm wondering how serious the criticism is.

I guess I'm not sure if I should treat the FQA as a valid analysis of C++ shortcomings, an entertaining document, or pointless whining.

Any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Author here. I personally treat it as a valid analysis of C++ shortcomings that unfortunately fails to address later standards starting with C++11, a hopefully entertaining document, and, insofar as it can't make someone compelled to use C++ any less compelled to use it, pointless whining. I think you hit the nail on the head 3 times. Glad to hear you enjoyed it (in hindsight, much of my own writing there feels cringeworthy to me, so I'm always happy when someone sees through the bad parts.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please don't editorialize titles. Your question would have been a good comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed, thanks.</comment></comment>


POTUS: 75 Year old appearing to scan communications in order to black out eqpmnt - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270333484528214018 <comment><USER2> This discussion is probably going to be flagged for being political, but I'll comment while it's here.

\--

I find it difficult to believe that the White House administration has any kind of expert opinion backing up this particular tweet.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't count anymore. We had expert opinions on Russians for three years and it was pure horseshit. We had innocents slandered as racists, sexists and generally deplorable. Trump just uses lies like that against political enemies. While it is not really viable to reciprocate this for a longer time, it is what it is and seems to work.

On the other hand, I need a 4th estate critical about a president. I never heard anything critical about Trumps competitors, so it might indeed be advantageous to vote for him as long as there is no critical press available.

<comment><USER4> The 4th estate crying bloody murder is what got him elected. Instead of ignoring him, they gave him all the press, and every person ready to put a shiv in the DNC voted for him, knowing he was exactly the kind of torment the DNC couldnt handle.

In the specific case of a wrecking ball, a candidate elected to purposely be a forest fire, any amount of press fans the flame.

[https://nypost.com/2016/11/20/keep-crying-wolf-about- trump-a...](https://nypost.com/2016/11/20/keep-crying-wolf-about-trump-and-no- one-will-listen-to-a-real-crisis/)

<comment><USER5> > The 4th estate crying bloody murder is what got him elected.

And it doesn't look like they've learnt any lessons in the interim, sadly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He thinks we're all fucking stupid.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, he doesn't.

He literally _knows_ of just how many people around the U.S., regardless of age - though definitely pointing towards the older internet-illiterate, will literally take the word of the POTUS without a second thought or fuck to their grave.

<comment><USER7> about 34%, right now.

"a bigger and bigger share of a smaller and smaller market is a death spiral"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Title is obviously not word for word quote due to title length reqs.

HNers of the USA - How can we just... Let this happen? It falls within free speech AFAIK. Is free speech a bad thing then? I really have no answers.

I hope some of you find this at least slightly thought provoking, whatever those thoughts may be.

<comment><USER8> Would it be wrong for me to print and sell 'ANTIFA provocateur' shirts?

<comment><USER9> Just be careful about wearing them in the wrong neighborhood

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These tweets need to stay up (perhaps marked as fact-free) so we can all see that the POTUS has a very strong case of narcissistic personality disorder and is most likely a sociopath.

<comment><USER11> Wow, what a difference that would make. If everyone knew that he was a narcissist and sociopath, they might just promote him to emperor.</comment></comment>


Researchers Challenge Low Expectations In Treating Cancer In Poor Countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/07/26/745225133/how-to-bring-cancer-care-to-the-worlds-poorest-children <comment><USER2> Sometimes it's not a myth. We can _cure_ a few kinds of leukemia with T-cell therapies. There is no way we know of to do so cheaply.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise- an...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise-and-price-of- cellular-therapies)

 _Perhaps the most immediate implication of the blurring of lines between procedure and drug is the conundrum of price. A single dose of Kymriah for pediatric ALL is priced at $475,000; for Yescarta, a CD19 T-cell therapy designed for certain types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, that number is $373,000. These prices rival those of some of the most expensive procedures in American medicine. (A kidney transplant can be priced at $415,000, a lung transplant at about $860,000.) And these price tags don't include the delivery of post- therapy care to CAR-T patients, who typically suffer complications from the infusion. Subsequent hospital stays and supportive care can drive the total costs to a million dollars or more.

...

Drug pricing is, of course, at the center of a familiar and inevitably acrimonious debate. The pharmaceutical industry defends high prices as a means to recoup the costs of drug discovery and development. Consumers, insurers, and governments argue that the prices charged for drugs are out of control, and bear no relationship to their real costs. But with cellular therapies the problem isn't merely profiteering—it is that, unlike conventional drugs, cell therapies are inherently expensive to produce. The estimated cost to manufacture a typical CAR-T infusion is close to six figures. In short, even if CAR-T therapy were offered with no margin of profit, it would still rank with some of the most expensive procedures in medicine. Extracting cells from an individual patient, purifying them, genetically modifying them, and expanding their numbers into the millions will never be akin to churning out amoxicillin in a factory._

<comment><USER3> There was an excellent BBC documenatry about this subject which may be of interest: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006nzt/war-in-the- bl...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006nzt/war-in-the-blood)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _" There's this myth that treating cancer is expensive," ... "And that's > because the data is almost all from high-income countries..."_

> _Much of the savings, the authors report, comes from the low cost of labor, > which for the entire cancer center amounted to less than the average annual > salary for one oncologist in the United States._

It's interesting because I too have been guilty of seeing a price in dollars and not adjusting for the fact that amount may have vastly different spending power even within the United States (and thus, less needed for the same services where there is greater spending power).

</comment><comment><USER5> _" myth that treating cancer is expensive"_

They use Burkitt's lymphoma as the example. The treatment is intense, but short duration chemo, and no radiation, or surgery...and less radiology, cat scans, pet scans, etc. That cuts out a lot of costs.

I'd be interested in what breast cancer, esophageal cancer, etc, cost in the same region. Those require longer and more rounds of chemo, radiation, surgery, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> The submitted title was '"There's this myth that treating cancer is expensive," says Christian Rusangwa', which broke the site guidelines against editorializing in titles. Would you mind reviewing them?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry Dang, I read the rules a long time ago and never thought it was something forbidden.

In the other hand I do not think the NPR title is very indicative of the content either: "How To Bring Cancer Care To The World's Poorest Children". Rwanda is certainly not the poorest country of the world, its large neighbor RDC, has the third of its GDP per capita in PPP.

Rwanda is one of the most promising African countries. A long time ago it was labelled the "The Swiss of Africa". What is strange is that 30km to the west there is the North Kivu, one of the poorest place on Earth.</comment></comment>


Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice - <AUTHOR> https://erikbern.com/2019/09/12/misc-unsolicited-career-advice.html <comment><USER2> In summary:

      network a *lot*
      Choose fast growing organizations
      Choose people you can learn from
      Enter a market with few smart people
      Use your smart connections to dominate that market

The key will be entering a market without a lot of smart folks in it, while also choosing the group _in_ that market that _is_ smart.

The problem is if most folks in a market aren't smart, then those who are really changing that market look _dumb_ to those already in it, so are the pioneering minds there smart or re-inventing failed wheels.

<comment><USER3> Networking is the only staging step on the list, which supports the titular concern about bias. Every other condensing step requires good judgement and luck, which isn't helpful as generic advice.

<comment><USER4> Joining a fast growing org early in your career is a bad idea, doing it as an intern is indispensable.

Also, networking is vital, however mostly to develop a filter for BS and BS slingers (money slingers or "rich" people are deceptively good at BS slinging). I had a friend who would go to meetups and befriend everyone, in my experience this is not really productive and will lead to being taken advantage of.

<comment><USER5> > Joining a fast growing org early in your career is a bad idea, doing it as > an intern is indispensable.

Isn't being an intern "early in your career"? I don't understand the logic above.

<comment><USER6> No, being an intern is prior to your career beginning.

If you are a junior engineer in a fast growing org you will work your ass off, being forced to cut corners to ship quickly, then rather than promote you the org will simply hire people above you. And you will find that what you learned was not a solid foundation to move onwards.

<comment><USER7> > then rather than promote you the org will simply hire people above you. And > you will find that what you learned was not a solid foundation to move > onwards.

Anecdata: junior engineer going through this process right now. Hard to move to a new company due to the specificity of the skills I developed and can't move up as they just bring in new people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This one I think is valuable for all ages: "When you're young, care more about building human quickly and not so much about financial capital. The human capital will pay much larger dividends over your lifetime."

I've worked from home quite a bit over the past few years and I've begun to notice it affecting my personal/communication skills. I'm actually trying to get back into the office more often.

<comment><USER4> Having worked remotely for a startup and within a really nice office for a corporate hell hole, I'm now convinced that the best balance for productivity / sanity for me is in-office 4 days a week with a handful of remote days.

When I was fully remote, after a few weeks I joined a really unique co-working space that was really more of a social club (Hall Boston - now defunct for any curious). It was a really special place, but in hindsight I didn't get much work done when I was focusing there. However, gives me hope for a resurgence of community driven social clubs for city dwellers and entrepreneurial types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Statistics. Seriously, I really wish I had studied more of it in school. > Basically goes for anyone in the STEM field, IMO.

I really wish more people invested in statistics and data analysis classes. People take you more seriously in a business setting when you can say "Email A resulted in a response rate of 80%". I usually hear "We think Email A is better because we feel it in our gut".

Ok, not those words exactly, but that's the point. Looking at data, understanding it, and directly applying it to your job is a hugely underrated skill.

<comment><USER10> I went to school for statistics, and work in "analytics" (a catch all term for anything from basic reporting to analytics infrastructure to conversion rate optimization experiments).

You're absolutely right in that people tend to take you more seriously if you come with numbers. But it's such a kangaroo court[1] that it drives me nuts. The instrumentation and implementation to support that sort of data-driven approach is usually far too lacking to give it the amount of merit it receives. Once you take do a first principle's sanity check of things, you learn that no one on the business side has a solid understanding of what "response rate" is actually referring to. Then when you look at the technical implementation, you realize that there's little reconciliation between what it's _actually_ representative of and what anyone on the business side think it's representative of.

Never underestimate someone's gut feeling, especially so if it's from an individual in the trenches. More often than not, dissonance between gut feelings and data point to an issue with the data. Not necessarily that the data is wrong, just that it isn't fully representative of the context it's being collected in and should be trusted accordingly.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_court)

<comment><USER11> Any recommendations for somebody who ignored stats more than he should have as an undergraduate and wants to try to catch up? I've gone through and worked all of the exercises in my old calculus textbook so I have a good (fresh) handle on calculus now. Where's the best place to go next?

<comment><USER12> For years I thought I had to do it the way the big boys do, studying university text books and referencing papers in the field and putting a bunch of mathematical notation in my designs and emails. While also knowing all the foundations underneath. Unsurprisingly, that didn't really go anywhere, except hours lost fiddling with Word's equation editor (or worse, Latex).

What _did_ help me was reading a few (really a few - just 2 or 3) simple, applied books; a 'statistics for dummies' (literally, the 'for dummies' book), a textbook used in undergrad business courses ('<something something> business analytics' I think?) and a book that applied all the stats to the field I was working on at the time (transportation modeling). Just being able to apply a linear regression (as in, actually being able to estimate the parameter on a single regressor in a simple data set) got me much further than all the times I thought 'whoops, getting into optimization now, better put this aside and first get a graduate level understanding of linear algebra'. And in a week instead of 2 years, too - quite important to keep your motivation up when you're not a full time student any more.

So while the above is not 'advice', it is my personal experience that when learning applied maths at a later age, it was better for me to focus on application and taking shortcuts even if that meant not fully knowing or understanding what was happening underneath - as intellectually unsatisfying and 'dirty' that felt at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this fear is based on a huge overestimation of the marginal utility of raw intelligence in the political/power field. When there's a coup somewhere it's usually not the math department that rolls triumphantly through town. Oppenheimer was a superintelligence compared to his rivals in the military industrial complex, and we know how that turned out. I could go on, but you get the point.

I think what we should be more worried about is the power dynamics/balance between groups of people in society. The relatively morally bankrupt "power people" within the military still needed the cooperation of people like Oppenheimer to get their hands on the bomb. That constraint could soon be gone...

</comment><comment><USER14> I would highly recommend subscribing to Erik's rss feed or email drip or whatever, his blog posts are always high quality and have been very useful to me when it comes to "career thinking." And fun fact, he wrote Annoy, which is damn good software.

[https://github.com/spotify/annoy](https://github.com/spotify/annoy)

[https://erikbern.com/2018/02/15/new-benchmarks-for- approxima...](https://erikbern.com/2018/02/15/new-benchmarks-for-approximate- nearest-neighbors.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> What are fast growing orgs/industries of today?

</comment><comment><USER16> upvote for learning stats. very valuable.</comment>


Advice on the implementation of a real-time trading system [closed] - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14254524/advice-on-the-implementation-of-a-real-time-trading-system

<comment><USER3> It's not the orders you need to monitor from the sound of it (at least once the trade is complete), it's the position that you hold in the market vs the current price.

* Actually the previous statement could be wrong: You might also want to do this on a per order basis, although they are on some sense functions of each other.

I would suggest the following:

For any market which you have a position in, subscribe to that market's price feed. I'd use zeromq for this, but there are plently of pub/sub libraries and products. The previous point implies that you are republishing your market data feed into specific channels. How they are mapped depends on many factors, but basically you want to de-multiplex the market data so that you are able to pick out one market's price data as a stream of updates from the whole.

Once you have a feed of the market with a position you can use it to transform the stream of market data to multiple streams of values. You might have new steam of PnL values for each order you have on the market, or a stream of price differences or whatever, you then re-publish those streams. Depending on how many of these derivative streams you have and the rate of data, you might want to do some downsampling too.

What I've described above is pretty similar to the market data architecture in hedge funds that I've worked at. Have a look at the ideas behind function reactive programming <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming> for more info on stream processing.

For the front end, you'll bridge the particular stream of data to a WebSocket (probably translating it to json or a binary data format that javascript can understand at the same time). I don't know how you do that in RoR, I'd use gevent or eventlet in the python world. You'll then need to route this data in some way to a representation of the order/position in the front end. I'd suggest looking at knockout.js, ember.js, angular or something similar as those declarative style libraries will massively reduce the complexity of your client side coding.

Last bit is visualization and there's really only one sane choice for this imho: D3 and libraries built on top of it. Look out for <http://square.github.com/cubism/> and <http://square.github.com/crossfilter/> and <http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/> for those bits.

Bit of a whirlwind here, hope it helps!

<comment><USER4> Regarding the front end, it's exactly what I'm doing right now. I receive the data, do some processing, pack it into json format and wire that using WebSockets to the client. It works really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He needs to get in touch with the stock exchange (and brokers) before jumping into any implementation conclusions.

He is not a broker, you can't really interact with any exchange directly. He needs to use some bank (which will already do 99% of what he is implementing).

Without knowing exactly how the market systems work, this is a toy, he should have talked to someone BEFORE writing any code. Things are way more complex and simpler than it looks. It's extremely simple to use bank services to do that for you and close to impossible for a developer to just jumpt into writing trading software without a bank backing it.

<comment><USER6> Someone ought to create a "stripe for stock trades" to make building stock bots easy-peasy for any developer looking for a challenge. I'd certainly use it.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like an idea PG would fund. The problem here is not even money, is having enough influence to get people and banks to trust you - and get a deal sweet enough to be profitable.

<comment><USER4> And that's exactly why is not that easy to get in touch with banks and brokers too.

"Financials" sucks and they hide every inner workings...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might be interested in zipline, an open source backtester written in Python. Zipline, Quantopian's open source backtester (yes, I work at Quantopian).

The backtester is designed to also be a trading engine. You feed zipline data in "events" where each event is a point in time. Zipline doesn't care if the events are live or replayed from a database - it processes the data and executes any trades in the order book.

The tricky part here is that zipline is more aimed at implementing trading algorithms. You'd have to write a simple algorithm to implement the buy/sell orders coming in.

<https://github.com/quantopian/zipline>

</comment><comment><USER8> Some of my similar architecture questions were closed by Mods. I don't know where one can ask such questions?

<comment><USER9> "I don't know where one can ask such questions?"

May be start a SO type site which focusses specifically on Artchitectural how- tos ? Like "How to design a real time trading system", "how to design a supply/chain software" etc. What do you think ?

<comment><USER10> I think the How To format might be too limiting as their are many possible answers. A wiki format with embedded diagramming targeted at architecture would probably suffice once you arrive at some standard for page structure.

This small toolset could also elaborate various business models and business processes as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting feedback I already got:

[https://groups.google.com/d/topic/celluloid- ruby/9RHPmYkxGtU...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/celluloid- ruby/9RHPmYkxGtU/discussion)

[https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rubysur/ZJoZxDVcRYU/discus...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rubysur/ZJoZxDVcRYU/discussion)

<comment><USER11> Lmax was the first thing I thought of too but I don't really see how it applies here.

Celluloid looks interesting have you played with it yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While it's certainly an interesting question, I presume you're posting it here to garner support for it being reopened (as far as the rules go, I agree with the closure, it's very open-ended). It might fit better on <http://programmers.stackexchange.com>.

I know little about stock markets but I quite like the idea of spawning workers to monitor orders after being placed. These could then update a page live to the customer.

<comment><USER11> I too think this is an interesting question and I'd love to hear how people would approach it.

How long do the orders need to be monitored for? Indefinitely? If so, is it really feasible to keep them all running? How much data do they need to analyse / aggregate to make their decisions?

Very interesting question.

<comment><USER4> For instance orders would be open from week into week if the user enables it (each week).

In my case "decision making" is only based on some fixed price threshold in order to provide some risk management. So the amount of data to aggregate would be minimal. But the data to analyse came directly (as a huge stream) from the markets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From some of the comments I see, let's not read too much into this. He's not asking how to build an -automated- trading system, just one that's realtime and all analysis and decisions are made by the user. The best I've seen that's commonly available is "Trader Workstation" and it's free with your account at Interactive Brokers. It's written in Java.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yesterday I learned about Postgres' LISTEN/NOTIFY functionality. I'm not sure about your architecture, or how many listeners/watchers Posgres supports, but it might be that you can just listen to changes in your database -- that might be the most lightweight solution.

Edit: Here is a small tutorial: [http://bjorngylling.com/2011-04-13/postgres- listen-notify-wi...](http://bjorngylling.com/2011-04-13/postgres-listen- notify-with-node-js.html)

<comment><USER15> If you're trading, keep it all out of the database. It won't scale and latency is terrible and unpredictable regardless of the engine.

Keep the database for storing stuff that you don't need in ram. Keep the rest in ram and message queuing/pubsub bus architecture.

Plus events in a database engine are a pain in the butt to write tests against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have made one in ruby for my trades. The key point of the architecture was to do all asynchronous with queues and workers. It worked for me because the network time was big and I don't do high frequency trading. I have used rabbitmq and ruby with event machine.

</comment><comment><USER17> You could use one of the realtime api's, like pusher or realtime.co. They can handle the scale. Otherwise erlang/otp looks like a good fit

</comment><comment><USER18> Use Java, of course.

<comment><USER4> Why "of course"?

<comment><USER15> Off the top of my head, the op is probably talking about the off the shelf stuff available for mq stuff and integration which is unsurpassed in java, plus the very low latency IO.

TBH when I write java, I usually write virtually no code: I just glue other shit together.

I don't get why people have so much against Java - it gets shit done in incredibly short amounts of time.

<comment><USER19> Until you have to come up with your own algorithm. Then you're stuck with ohgods-so-many-.java-files

<comment><USER15> Depends. I wrote a rather complicated corridor based routing algorithm for a courier company in the UK which worked on real time traffic data. It was only 11 files and 12,000 loc and that was their entire business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wouldn´t it be much more interesting to spend that precious brainpower into something that actually solves real problems like war, disease, crime, militarism, xenophopia, lack of education, etc. instead of building another greed-engine that will trigger even more poverty, exploitation and repression?

Of course everybody is free to act on his own karma (in a few countries) - <USER2> you will have a much better life by doing some more useful work that will benefit all human beeings, not only a few criminals that build weapons of mass murder just for the mentally poor reason of making more and more money.

Programmers haz powers to push human evolution, don´t waste your life on golden lies, that will turn into deadly dust in the end!

<comment><USER21> This kind of sanctimony is tiring. Every time one of these threads comes up here, it inevitably devolves to a point where someone brings up something like the above. There are those of us who actually enjoy these kinds of problems in and of themselves. I don't consider what I do particularly noble, but I'm paid to solve very interesting and unusual problems in a very fast-paced environment, and I don't feel the need to apologize for it.

I'm under no illusions that I'm doing God's Work, but if the bar for useful work is something that will end "war, disease, crime, militarism, xenophopia, lack of education", I think >99% of us fall quite short of it. Maybe I fall shorter than you do (you don't mention what it is that you do), but I still enjoy my job.</comment></comment>


New Discoveries in Greece Reveal Ancient Roman Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/14/new-underwater-discoveries-in-greece-reveal-ancient-roman-engineering <comment><USER2> Very jealous of the people who get to do this as I sit here on my computer. The trident on the stone and the mud level is fantastic, can't wait to see the next organic material that is revealed.</comment>


Magic-mushroom drug lifts depression in first human trial - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/magic-mushroom-drug-lifts-depression-in-first-human-trial-1.19919?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews <comment><USER2> YC partner Justin Kan has a sketch of magic mushrooms framed in his living room. I saw it on his Snapchat when he showed his followers around his house.</comment>